Friday, September 21, 2012

Comic of the Week


Thursday, September 20, 2012

With Friends Like Us...

In case you haven't noticed, Israel lives in a pretty tough neighborhood.

Egypt lies to the west, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the east, Lebanon and Syria to the north. Geography is not her friend.

Fewer than 8 million Israelis cling to a little sliver of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, surrounded by hundreds of millions of hostile Muslims.

At the end of World War II, after more than 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, most of the civilized world was shocked by the horrors of the Holocaust. World opinion was shamed into a brief period of sympathy for the Jewish survivors, who soon began emigrating from Europe to Israel.

By the time Israel declared itself a nation in 1948, there were over a million Jews living there, and Democrat President Harry Truman immediately established diplomatic relations with the new Jewish state.

We have had a special relationship with Israel ever since. Israel glistens as an oasis of democracy in a mid-eastern desert of tyranny. Israel was our staunchest ally throughout the Cold War, and more recently, the war on terror.

For reasons only he knows, our president disdains the nation of Israel. Soon after his election, Obama made a bee-line for Egypt so that he could grovel before the Muslims during his "world-apology" tour. But he didn't have time to visit Israel.

Obama has had time to host lavish state dinners for the Communist Chinese. He has invited groups of imams over for several Ramadan dinners at the White House. But the first time Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu came to visit, Obama made a point of publicly snubbing him.

No state dinner for Netanyahu. No dinner at all, for that matter.

When the president finally agreed to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister and his aides in March 2010, Obama gave them an earful about making concessions to Arab demands. Then he excused himself to go upstairs and have dinner with Michelle and the kids, leaving the Israelis to stew by themselves in the Roosevelt room. 


Later that evening, Netanyahu was unceremoniously shooed out the side door of the White House.  NBC report of Obama/Netanyahu meeting

I suppose we should be thankful that Obama stopped short of offering him a ham sandwich and poking him in the eye with a stick.

Fast forward to today: With Iran on the brink of possessing nuclear weapons, Israel is understandably alarmed. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly declared for years that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

The Jews will soon be threatened with annihilation. There is a tiny window of time left for Israel to decide how to neutralize the grave threat posed by Iranian nukes. Prime Minister Netanyahu is coming to Washington later this month to attend the U.N. General Assembly, and he has asked for a meeting with President Obama, presumably to discuss this dire situation.

But our president does not have time to meet with the Prime Minster. The Israelis were told, "The president's schedule will not permit that."

Obama has time to do the Letterman show. He has time to play golf. He has time to do celebrity campaign fund-raisers with Jay-Z and Beyonce. 


But time for a meeting with the Prime Minister of Israel, our only democratic ally in a middle east on the brink of war? Not so much.
  

               *Also see When Israel Draws a Line in the Sand

Monday, September 10, 2012

The Day the Liberals Booed God

Pat Buchanan gives a sober and disturbing assessment of a Democratic Party that has lost it's way.  READ MORE

Saturday, September 1, 2012

If It Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck...

Out of curiosity, I occasionally visit the website of the Communist Party USA to see what the wackos are up to.

It amazes me that the Communist Party still exists. After almost a century of abysmal failure, one might hope that people would have figured out Communism is not the way to go.

Just consider the awful barbaric history of Communism: the millions of Russians murdered by Lenin and starved by Stalin, the tens of millions who perished in the slave labor camps of the Soviet gulags, the tens of millions who suffered and died in the inhuman conditions of Communist prisons in China, Cuba, North Korea and eastern Europe.

With such a track record of cruelty and human misery, you might think that the Communist brand would be out of favor. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

Human beings have an amazing capacity to keep repeating the same stupid mistakes while hoping for entirely new outcomes. I cannot explain this. I can only observe that it is so.

So this morning when I visited the website of the Communist Party USA, I was not surprised to see the same tired old Socialist drivel being featured on the home page.

There were links to articles about: The War on Women -- The Dangers of Paul Ryan's Tax Cuts --  Recalling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker -- Supporting the Occupy Movement -- Fighting Against Voter ID Laws.

I clicked a link to a page with this headline: 

Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!

I read the usual boiler-plate indictment of the evil rich Capitalists and how they were destroying the lives of the poor downtrodden masses. At the end of the article, there was a bullet-pointed list of action items that I found interesting. I will quote this list below:
  • End the Bush-era tax giveaways to banks, corporations and wealthy individuals.
  • Close corporate tax loopholes, especially billions in tax subsidies for the oil companies.
  • Raise new revenues by restoring 70% tax rate on incomes over $1 million.
  • Raise $150 billion a year by imposing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculation.
  • Cut the military budget by half. Bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • Create jobs in a major public works program to repair our nation’s infrastructure and to make our nation number one in “green industry.” 
  • Target the jobs to hard-hit inner city communities and the rural poor.
  • Fully fund a national health care program and drastically increase federal aid to education, Pell Grants, and other vital human needs programs.
  • Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that CEOs and hedge fund managers pay the same rate as the rest of us.
Then it dawned on me: Everything written on this Communist Party website could have been reprinted verbatim on the Democratic Party website. There was not a single idea advanced by the Communists that I had not heard before from Democrats.

In fact, this action list sounds a lot like the Democratic Party platform.

So, I have a question for all my Democrat friends. Does it bother you at all that your party is completely in lock-step with the policy goals of the Communist Party USA?

And if not, why not?